Elon Musk reportedly orders Twitter to remove suicide prevention feature
According to new reports, Elon Musk has quietly removed a Twitter feature that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to potentially vulnerable users.
The feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, showed contacts for support organisations when users searched for content related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
Its elimination has sparked concern about how Twitter can safeguard the wellbeing of vulnerable users on the platform. It is currently not clear why Musk would order the feature to be removed – though Reuters approached both him and Twitter for comment, they received no reply.
#ThereIsHelp was introduced about five years ago and had been available in over 30 countries, according to company tweets. It was part of a larger move by many social media platforms to respond to pressure from consumer safety groups. In one of its blog posts about the feature, Twitter had said it had a responsibility to ensure users could “access and receive support on our service when they need it most”.
“If this decision is emblematic of a policy change that they no longer take these issues seriously, that’s extraordinarily dangerous,” said Alex Goldenberg, lead intelligence analyst at the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute (via The Guardian). “It runs counter [to] Musk’s previous commitments to prioritise child safety.”
Musk had previously said that combatting child abuse imagery on the platform was “priority number one”, but in contrast, when he first took over the platform back in October, many of the content moderation staff were laid off. This was also attributed as the reason why racist tweets about footballers of colour ahead of the Qatar World Cup were reportedly not being taken down.
In other Twitter news, the platform just rolled out a feature allowing users to see how many people have viewed a tweet. The feature is designed to show “how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem”. According to Musk, over 90 per cent of Twitter users read a tweet without liking, commenting on or retweeting it.
The post Elon Musk reportedly orders Twitter to remove suicide prevention feature appeared first on NME.
Emma Wilkes
NME
